00:27:45 · David Steinberg, Guillaume Moubeche
I think you're going to have a lot of moving parts going into the next five to ten years, which I think are going be incredible. By the way, it's why we bought Senso AI. It's why we believe the future of a big component of e commerce is going to be a genetic base. It's why we've built out our generative engine optimization platform as an entirely new channel, and we're helping enterprises with it. And it's why we believe that those frontier models are going to inform the agents, which are going to then go off and do the commerce on behalf of individuals. So if you look at what instinct's doing, you look at what meta's doing with... I'm using it, the name escapes me. Could look right on my That's [00:28:34] S1: on OpenAI or like Grok. [00:28:37] S0: No, Muse. I was looking for Meta. Yeah, yeah. But you could look at my phone and you could see, I love them all. It's great. I would tell you that Dots is incredible. I think people are sleeping on it. And I think the big difference with Dots is if you get the enterprise version, you can integrate it into your enterprise grade software versus inference. So I find Muse is really good on e commerce. I think Instinct is incredible from a conversational perspective, because I'm an iMessage guy anyway, and it's fully integrated into their API. I don't know how they got permission to do that, but it's incredible. And Dots has been really great. I'm getting up to speed on it because it's a little newer. But I think the automation of a lot of the stuff that we spend a lot of time on is coming.
00:28:37 · David Steinberg, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:28:37] S0: No, Muse. I was looking for Meta. Yeah, yeah. But you could look at my phone and you could see, I love them all. It's great. I would tell you that Dots is incredible. I think people are sleeping on it. And I think the big difference with Dots is if you get the enterprise version, you can integrate it into your enterprise grade software versus inference. So I find Muse is really good on e commerce. I think Instinct is incredible from a conversational perspective, because I'm an iMessage guy anyway, and it's fully integrated into their API. I don't know how they got permission to do that, but it's incredible. And Dots has been really great. I'm getting up to speed on it because it's a little newer. But I think the automation of a lot of the stuff that we spend a lot of time on is coming. [00:29:31] S1: And you talked about the acquisition of Senso recently. I know you've done about 19 acquisition in nineteen years. [00:29:38] S0: It's probably more, but yeah, I joke we've done 19 acquisitions in nineteen years. It's highly probable there'll be a twentieth. But we do acqui hires. We're doing little deals all the time. But to your question, I'm sorry.
00:29:38 · David Steinberg, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:29:38] S0: It's probably more, but yeah, I joke we've done 19 acquisitions in nineteen years. It's highly probable there'll be a twentieth. But we do acqui hires. We're doing little deals all the time. But to your question, I'm sorry. [00:29:52] S1: What would be like the top three lessons you've learned from integrating companies successfully? Like I've acquired like a couple, and I think it's always like hard, you know, like to define, like how does you make it a success? How do you, like, make sure that the the the best people in the team also stay? Like... Or if it's entrepreneurs to incentivize them enough for the long run? Like, I'm curious to see, like, what's your method and strategy about it?
00:30:18 · David Steinberg
[00:30:18] S0: If you asked me under oath for Zeta's three biggest superpowers, AI development, data as a moat, and our ability to buy and fully integrate companies. And we've done 19 big deals in nineteen years. We've been successful on 18 of them. Now, I want to quantify that every one of them, by definition, my definition has been a tuck in. Some of them have been bigger, some of them have been smaller. I believe transformative M and A transforms both companies for the worse. So that's it. B, we have five pillars of M and A. If a deal does not hit all five, we will not do it, meaning you have to buy the right companies. So we'll look at a 100 deals to do one. Very briefly, our five pillars. Number one, and this is the most important, and nobody thinks about it. We have to be able to fully integrate them to our tech or data stack within twelve months. We will never run a business as standalone. Two, they have to want to buy... Their clients have to want to buy our products or vice versa. Three, the deal has to be accretive the day we close. We're not going to build all these synergies down the road. We do, and that's great, but that's upside. Number four, they have to have a technology or a dataset that's unique to us that we cannot build ourselves as fast as we could do it by buying them. And number five, they have to have incredible people that we believe we can keep. So if you look at the 20 highest ranking global people at Zeta, I believe 12 to 14 of them came into M and A. Wow. Nice. And if you look at the six highest ranking people in the company, still myself, Steve Gerber, our president, with me fifteen years, came into M and A. Chris Mombberg, our CTO, head of product, came into M and A. Nish Gore, chief data officer, came into M and A. Steve Vine, our general counsel, represented an opponent on the deal, and we said, We need that guy on our side. And then Chris, we brought in through a long recruiting process. When you think about the organization, Nish did a podcast recently. One of the things that I really thought was amazing was him talking about how we keep entrepreneurs and turn them into intrapreneurs in our company. And listen, for an entrepreneur to become an intrapreneur, A, they have to be really excited about what you're doing.
00:32:54 · David Steinberg, Guillaume Moubeche
Because I would tell you the people in our senior executive team at this point are getting a recruiting call a day. Two, you have to incentivize them. They're major shareholders in our company, and if they leave, they lose that. Right? And three, I joke, I started my first company when I was 16, gee. I started my first real company when I was 21. I was the youngest person in the room in any company I ran for the first twenty years. I am now, Gee, universally the oldest person in any room I walk into. As an old entrepreneur versus a young one, I would tell you my single most important job. I mean, you got to set the strategy. You got to set the vision. You got to be the engine that runs behind everything as an entrepreneur. You know that. But you've got to hire the world's greatest people and let them do their jobs. My old pitch to an entrepreneur is join us, do the coolest shit you could ever do. You'll never have to worry about HR, legal, and accounting again. Yeah. And you'll make five, 10 times more money on our stock than you will on your stand alone. [00:34:07] S1: That's a good pitch. It [00:34:09] S0: works. Right. [00:34:11] S1: Awesome. Awesome. Well, I know we're like out of time, so I don't... I wanna be super cautious. Where can... I mean, it was an amazing conversation, so I really wanna thank you, and I'm sure the audience will also really enjoy it. Where can people follow you and follow the updates of Zeta Global?
00:34:11 · Guillaume Moubeche, David Steinberg
[00:34:11] S1: Awesome. Awesome. Well, I know we're like out of time, so I don't... I wanna be super cautious. Where can... I mean, it was an amazing conversation, so I really wanna thank you, and I'm sure the audience will also really enjoy it. Where can people follow you and follow the updates of Zeta Global? [00:34:28] S0: I've become a sort of X guy by accident. So I'm on X, I mean LinkedIn, of course. But listen, this is not The David Steinberg Show, this is Zeta Global. I mean, we have over 3,000 of the world's greatest people wake up every morning to try to make our clients better organizations with the highest return on marketing and technology spend humanly possible. And I will tell you, I say this very humbly, and you hear this type of stuff, but I will tell you it's not bullshit. The honor of my professional life is to run this company. [00:35:10] S1: I love this. And thanks for sharing the patient, David. [00:35:14] S0: Well, listen, the next time I'm in Paris, we have to go to a Mie Louie together, my favorite place in Paris, and I'm there all the time. And thank God you're one of the few French people I can actually really understand. Your accent is amazing. [00:35:29] S1: Thank you, David. [00:35:29] S0: That was a joke. I don't want to piss off all our French people or customers. I'm a bit of a Francophile. Love France. [00:35:39] S1: Thanks a lot, David. Have a awesome day. [00:35:42] S0: Thanks, Chi. You too.